Earth

The JRC has designed a global index to support the EU's Global Climate Change Alliance plus (GCCA+) programme in its goal to help the most vulnerable countries to respond to climate change in the period up to 2020. It has been presented today at a dedicated event at COP21, the UN Climate Conference in Paris.

Some materials that are inherently disordered display unusual conductivity, sometimes behaving like insulators and sometimes like conductors. Physicists have now analysed the conductivity in a special class of disordered materials. Martin Puschmann from the Technical University Chemnitz, Germany, and colleagues have demonstrated that electrons in the materials studied display a multifractal spatial structure at the transition between conductive and insulating behaviour. These findings have just been published by in EPJ B.

Stochastic acceleration and shock acceleration are well recognized as key mechanisms for cosmic ray generation since first proposed by Fermi. So far, these two mechanisms have been investigated widely by analytical models and numerical simulations, but often modeled separately. In a recent paper published in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy 58(10), 105201 (2015) by Cui et al., it is found that the two mechanisms can occur naturally in sequential two stages when a lepton flow propagates in a background interstellar plasma.

Amsterdam, December 2, 2015 - Chemical triggers that make plants defend themselves against insects could replace pesticides, causing less damage to the environment. New research published in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters identifies five chemicals that trigger rice plants to fend off a common pest - the white-backed planthopper, Sogatella furcifera

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are proposing a new way to process nuclear waste that uses a plasma-based centrifuge. Known as plasma mass filtering, the new mass separation techniques would supplement chemical techniques. It is hoped that this combined approach would reduce both the cost of nuclear waste disposal and the amount of byproducts produced during the process. This work was supported by PPPL's Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Engineers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental breakthrough in understanding the physics of photonic "sintering," which could lead to many new advances in solar cells, flexible electronics, various types of sensors and other high-tech products printed onto something as simple as a sheet of paper or plastic.

Sintering is the fusing of nanoparticles to form a solid, functional thin-film that can be used for many purposes, and the process could have considerable value for new technologies.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1, 2015 -- You have probably had the burning sensation of eating a jalapeno or other tear-inducing pepper. What causes this painful fire in your mouth? The short answer is capsaicin. But what exactly is capsaicin? How does it work? Why do people drink milk to relieve the pain? Reactions has the chemistry to answer all of these sizzling questions. Check it out here before you order those extra chilies: https://youtu.be/73yo5nJne6c.

It's easy to think of plants as passive features of their environments, doing as the land prescribes, serving as a backdrop to the bustling animal kingdom.

Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester.

A study led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester's Department of Mathematics, has shown that an increase in the water temperature of the world's oceans of around six degrees Celsius -- which some scientists predict could occur as soon as 2100 -- could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.

AMHERST, Mass. - Results from a 15-year study of factors affecting population levels of Eastern brook trout in the face of climate change show that high summer air temperatures have a large influence, in particular on the smallest fry and eggs, which are most important to wild trout abundance in streams.

A camera so advanced that it can photograph and film methane in the air around us is now presented by a team of researchers from Linköping and Stockholm Universities. It can be an important part of the efforts to measure and monitor greenhouse gases.

NASA's GPM core satellite and NOAA's GOES-West satellite saw the Southern Pacific Ocean's Tropical Storm Tuni was being battered by wind shear and had lost its tropical characteristics.

On Nov. 28, the RapidScat instrument aboard the International Space Station saw Tropical Cyclone Tuni's maximum sustained winds near 27 meters per second (60.4 mph/97.2 kph) southeast of the center.

Savannah, Ga. - University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography scientist Aron Stubbins led a team of researchers to determine the levels of black carbon in Arctic rivers and found that the input of black carbon to the Arctic Ocean is likely to increase with global warming. The results of their study were recently published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science.

Using statistically modeled maps drawn from satellite data and other sources, U.S. Geological Survey scientists have projected that the near-surface permafrost that presently underlies 38 percent of boreal and arctic Alaska would be reduced by 16 to 24 percent by the end of the 21st century under widely accepted climate scenarios. Permafrost declines are more likely in central Alaska than northern Alaska.

Researchers for the first time have attempted to measure all the material leaving and entering a mountain range over more than a million years and discovered that erosion caused by glaciation during ice ages can, in the right circumstances, wear down mountains faster than plate tectonics can build them.